Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  The Bakersfield audience had been polite and receptive, but somehow, during the question period, things had fallen apart. When she had referred to a numerical figure in one of the tapestries, a man had stood up, waited for the microphone to be passed to him, then shouted “Six-six-six is the mark of the Beast.”

  “ ‘Six-six-six’ refers to Nero,” Lorna began. She had tried to explain that the people of Saint John’s era, afraid to mention their Roman oppressors by name, had employed euphemisms like “Beast.” But, ignoring her completely, somebody immediately shouted down the original speaker, saying the Beast was Satan, as everybody knew, and moreover the Beast was nigh.

  “We are in the Last Days,” he whispered into the portable microphone.

  “We are not,” from someone else. Bakersfield was likely to be inundated, and soon. No, it would not. Destroyed by storms. No, drought. She found herself in the midst of a sectarian quarrel which engaged more and more members of the audience, people flinging esoteric biblical trivia instead of, as she had imagined they would, questions about the practical problems of getting to Angers, France, or which were her favorite restaurants in Paris.

  She felt chastened not to have imagined that people who would come to an art lecture could be not art lovers but religious fundamentalists. They seemed to have been drawn by the word “Apocalypse” in the title of her talk. She was asked her view of the Apocrypha. She was asked if she had considered that she herself might be one of the two witnesses, returning as predicted…She was asked if she had found Jesus. Lorna was jolted to realize again that, except for nearly annual visits to her children in the years they didn’t visit her in France, she had been gone from America for twenty years. Maybe America was everywhere like this now, boiling with piety. She had never thought of America as a society driven by faith, not anymore, anyhow; in France, fiercely Catholic in name, people didn’t actually seem to go to church. But here they claimed to go to church.

  Driving her to the Bakersfield airport, the lecture agent pronounced himself very well satisfied that her talk had been so relevant, so involving, and was sure to get good press coverage. Each note of praise had baffled her more; not one person had asked what it was like living in France.

  “I’ll email about setting up a date for Fresno,” he had assured her.

  17

  The quotidian is the enemy of the ideal.

  In the days that followed, Lorna occupied herself anew with seeing apartments—feeling it to be a futile exercise—making inquiries about lawyers, going twice to take the adorable grandsons Marcus and Manuel to the park, though these strenuous tots left her exhausted, and writing to lecture agents and university faculties to announce her availability.

  When it came to calling her old friends, something strangely kept her back—reluctance to explain what she was doing here after twenty years, the thinnish sound of her explanation, the lack of conviction in her own voice, though she felt determined and strong. The two divorces, or almost.

  She’d just wait awhile till she got settled, and got some jobs. She did confide in Pam, still down in Ojai, over the phone, where at least you didn’t need to see the sympathetic pucker of your friend’s lips, the little crease between her eyebrows. No one leaves a husband after so many years unless it was a misery the whole time, not her case. She’d had a lot of fun with Armand-Loup.

  At the urging of Ursula Aymes, who seemed to have taken an interest in her case even without the hope of a rental commission, let alone a house sale, she made an appointment with a downtown divorce lawyer Ursula thought would be capable of dealing with any international complications. She hadn’t heard anything more from Armand-Loup on the subject, but feared that French jurisprudence was operating in her absence, to her disadvantage.

  As for being in San Francisco, it appeared that wherever she found to live would require several thousand dollars in deposit, first and last months’ rent, and expenses to set it up with furniture, pots and pans. She’d expected that, of course, but it would still be a hit. How odd that she and all her children were facing crises about real estate—Misty and Hams wanting to buy in a better neighborhood, Peggy needing a loan to make her payments, not Curt and Donna anymore, but only recently out of the woods. She thought with a pang of her rich ex-husband Ran. She also thought with a pang almost as deep, or, actually, deeper, of her French house with its fourteen-foot ceilings and carven doors, and poutres apparentes that had been painted over the centuries with the names of artisans or residents, names faded now but decipherable, some of the same names of families who still lived in Pont-les-Puits. She loved the idea of tradition, continuation; she hated the idea of the teardowns you saw in California.

  The only stirrings from Pont-les-Puits in recent days had been from the persistent mayor, Barbara Levier. Her équipe had not definitively identified the bones of Russell Woods, but they had some positive IDs for others, and the cost was running around fifteen hundred euros per case—it would be so civic minded of Lorna to advance the money she was going to have to pay down the line anyway.

  “Mais, Barbara,” Lorna would remonstrate, “Je ne suis pas concerné par les bones of poor Russell.” People had been so forgiving about her franglais twenty years ago, she still occasionally invoked it, though she knew French perfectly well, except for forgetting, just now, the word for “bones.”

  Pont-les-Puits was implacable. Lorna was sure Armand-Loup was pulling the strings of this harassment; she could hear him laughing. Though she was also sure she would never really have to pay fifteen hundred euros for the bones of an unrelated acquaintance, she found the idea infuriating, when she so wanted to put Pont-les-Puits out of her mind.

  She kept her best mind on the tapestries of Angers and finding another lecture venue. She hadn’t heard from the promised contact in Fresno and, anyhow, Fresno…Had she not lectured at the Louvre, at the Doria Pamphili? She dutifully wrote and emailed places she’d given her lectures on Redon and Meissonier in the past. The past. How do you remind people of your existence? How do you reassure them you are still active, informed, plugged in? Was “plugged in” the expression? It came to her in French: branché, au courant. Not over the hill.

  * * *

  —

  One positive bit of news, Barbara Levier told her; Mr. Dumas, good at reading English, volunteered to read the stuff in Mr. Woods’s boxes, and there had found an unsent letter to Lorna asking her to make sure his pictures went to the right people. He mentioned several wrong people by name, and some institutions that apparently had scorned him. Perhaps, poor man, he’d had an intimation of approaching death. Madame Levier would send Lorna a copy.

  Lorna said she’d be happy to do whatever, but doubted she could do anything now that Woods was a magnet for dealers and collectors. The discussion of poor Russell’s reinterment had awakened Lorna’s grief at his death, and above all the need to think about death. Generally, her attitude had always been that it was too soon to think about this depressing subject; she would do it later. But Russell’s death, only seventy-one when he died, had dramatized its inevitability, the unwelcome pertinence of its iconography, the relevance of Montaigne and the other philosophers who seemed to go on about it. She wished Russell were alive, and she would help where she could to do things in his memory; but she didn’t have the extra money to rescue his bones.

  In Pont-les-Puits, work had proceeded on cleaning up the graveyard. The scattered tombstones had tentatively been set up following the plot map from the cemetery office, and bones had been gathered with reference to the coffins found nearest them and packaged for the DNA technicians, each package with a skull on top, all of them removed to the market hall and arrayed on the long table there, like party favors at a Halloween dinner. A Cambodian DNA team, cheaper than the Yugoslavs, had been hired but wasn’t expected for a month, though a representative had flown in to supervise the collecting, which was done by the regular guardian—Monsie
ur Flores—who dug the recent graves and tended the shrubbery.

  The enormous heap of bones was still drying and being sorted on large tables assembled inside the covered Pont-les-Puits market building. Attention was paid to where they had been discovered and to the basic facts of anatomy—that is, two legs to one rib cage, only twenty-four ribs to a person, only one skull, and so on. Where bits of clothing had remained, these were meticulously packaged into little cushions on which the skull was rested. Clothing, at least in the case of the most recent interments, was more recognizable than old bones; some more recent graves had yielded horrible apparitions of familiar faces now half mouldered away.

  Not everyone could bear to look at what was going on. The mayor, Madame Levier, had gone to the cemetery once, had felt faint, and after that sent her deputy, Monsieur Blostin. She had never gone inside the market hall. Some people had been neither to the site nor the hall, but there were a few who were obsessively drawn to these places, ostensibly out of concern for the remains of loved ones and ancestors. It was one of these obsessives, Mademoiselle Berthaut, coming by the market hall after dark, though not late, say about nine, who saw gentle light emanating from one of the packets on the long table. She stared through the windows but couldn’t really tell which packet, which skull; too bad because they could have safely assumed that the glowing one was Saint Brigitte. Madame Levier appointed a committee to take turns checking nightly to see if this radiance happened again. At a meeting, it was decided that to obviate the need for continuous surveillance, the hours between nine and eleven each night would be optimum, and someone was appointed to investigate installing some light-activated video-recording equipment.

  18

  Even the smallest gold-rush California town prides itself on its opera house, sure symptom of the culturally correct.

  The San Francisco opera house arises amid parking lots and reconstruction zones in the Civic Center of the city, facing the golden dome of the city hall, itself resembling similar structures in Rome and Paris, shining in the occasional sunshine like the Institut de France or even Saint Peter’s in Rome, though of course smaller. It was in the vaulted lobby of the opera house that Randall and Amy Hawkins Mott were tonight hosting their dinner to benefit the Children’s Diabetes Foundation.

  There is an adequate dining room in the sous-sol of the opera house, but because that is where people reserved and ate their dinners ordinarily, Amy had thought it wasn’t grand enough for something as expensive as this benefit after the opera; theirs was to be held in the exalted marble lobby imposingly full of echoes and architectural references to both Palladio and Erté. Tonight the performance had ended, and the caterers commenced their installations, skillfully whipping in with tables and chairs even as the audience was leaving. Amy had authorized them to spare no expense on the flowers, to humanize the vast scale of the room, whose columns now sprouted great festoons of picturesque weeds, lilies, and gladioli. At the right moment, a forest fire of candles would spring to light as if by a signal from above. Amy and Ran had seen to the placement themselves, setting the little name cards and favors at each plate, helped by Amy’s personal assistant, Carla.

  In San Francisco, the younger dot-com billionaires cooperated only occasionally with the old guard represented by the ancient grandes dames and established San Francisco business fortunes derived from blue jeans and Pinot Noir; only on rare occasions did the younger Silicon Valley people notice or deign to support the needy and virtuous civic institutions like the opera and symphony that made San Francisco worth living in. God knew what other causes interested the younger rich; but little by little, like milk through muslin, drip by drip, once in a while one of them dripped through or oozed into the cultural life of the city—that is, the opera, the symphony, and the art museum, especially the photography department.

  Par for her age group, Amy Hawkins (Mott) had supported photography but had been slow to take an interest in the opera, now at least to the extent of hosting this dinner at the opera house. Her main interest remained the General Hospital where they had once saved Gilda’s life when she was a toddler, before the diagnosis of diabetes, when it had seemed that her mysterious illnesses might kill her.

  The dinner was well subscribed by the generous community, including two of the older Establishment ladies whose money came from land grants and iconic clothing brands and was usually spent on wine growing, Picassos, and Pollocks. Over there was Joanne Drill—who wouldn’t have known a byte from a megabyte but ponied up for operas and the art museum. Marian Whistler was a reliable donor to anything with singing. As the subscription had filled up so quickly, Amy had wondered if they should have increased the donation price, to allow people to pay more. Now Ran Mott and Amy Hawkins, he in black tie and she in floating Givenchy chiffon, shivering a bit in the June chill, greeted the benefactors and personally showed them to the various tables.

  Ran and Amy had taken three tables themselves—one, at the side near the stairs, was for Gilda and several of her friends and other children of Amy and Ran’s friends, the young people. Ran thought Gilda, dressed up like this and permitted to wear mascara for the occasion, looked eerily, palely, ethereally lovely and much older than fifteen, like a child playing dress-up. Her beauty was gratifying, as, looking so pretty, she was spared the malice with which people seemed often to remark that such and such daughter of a Silicon Valley billionaire had not been saved by her parents’ money from being ugly as a pug. Gilda was silver and ivory.

  The female waitpeople, including his granddaughter Julie, Ran saw, had been made to wear a sort of French-maid costume reminiscent of old-fashioned porn—white blouses and frilly little white aprons over short black skirts. Was this the caterer’s idea or Amy’s? Julie exuded radiant confidence as she swooped around with her tray, collecting empty glasses and discarded toothpicks from the hors d’oeuvres. He smiled encouragingly, approvingly, at her and planned to point her out to Amy; Ran tried to think whether his wife Amy and his granddaughter Julie had actually ever met, beyond at a reception he and Amy had given after their marriage, a private ceremony with a few family members just before Gilda was born. Julie would have been only four or five. Back then they had weighed the tactfulness of entertaining the family with Amy so visibly pregnant, but after all, it was the modern world, especially for Amy’s generation. People hadn’t needed to come if they disapproved, but they all came.

  As he watched, Julie approached Amy, who was talking to Babe Miller and Fuffy Stevens and a couple of the other elderly great ladies of San Francisco, and took away their empty glasses and replaced them with filled ones, apparently without stirring recognition by either Julie or Amy. Not that Amy had anything against Julie, or any of his children or grandchildren, but she was sensitive about the problems so unfairly loaded on their own child, poor little Gilda, while Ran’s other children were nothing if not robust, except Curt after his accident.

  * * *

  —

  Feeling self-conscious in her French-maid apron and cap, Julie scanned the room. Beside Grandpa Ran there was Step-Grandma Amy—that must be her, urging people to sit down. There was no mistaking which one was Gilda. Aunt Gilda! Julie spotted her right off, the silvery hair, pretty child’s face, tinted glasses, and general shrinking puniness. Her mother and her siblings from the first batch referred to her as “the Princess.” Terrible dress of blue knitted lace, exactly what a mother would make you wear.

  Julie had always thought it unfair—violently unfair—that her fifteen-year-old half aunt, her mother Peggy’s much-younger half sister, Gilda, had money for the asking, private schools, huge allowance, probably everything she wanted, though since she didn’t know Gilda, she had no notion of what she would want. Julie’s objections were philosophical as well as personal; she was all for the redistribution of wealth. She resented on her mother’s behalf that Peggy’s talented craft efforts—belts and earrings, candles, personalized shop signs—were so poo
rly rewarded; many were her projects, small was the recompense for honest handiwork, while out of sight was the recompense for the invisible profits of money managers and Internet and tech profiteers like her grandfather’s wife, Amy.

  Of course Julie wouldn’t trade places with Gilda, but still, she couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to just ask for something and get it. A horse! A two-hundred-dollar pair of jeans! What kinds of things would Gilda ask for? Julie examined her heart for signs of envy and, thinking of Gilda’s well-known poor health, exonerated her own character: she would not trade places with Gilda. When she got a chance, she took some glasses of Coke and orange juice to Gilda’s table, and identified herself. A couple of fat younger boys sat at Gilda’s table, typical rich kids in blue blazers.

  “Hi, Gilda, you don’t remember me, I’m Julie, my mom is Peggy—your half sister! I’m helping here tonight…”

  “Julie! Hi!” The girl spoke so promptly, Julie realized Gilda had seen her already. Gilda explained to her friends about how this older girl was her niece, and they all laughed at the vagaries of chronology. Julie noted how accurately Gilda was aware of their relationship and knew how it had all come about, and how pleased she was to speak of their connection.

  “You should come up to the city and hang out with me one of these days,” Julie suggested. She hovered only a second longer, then went off with her tray.

  Gilda hoped to do that; Gilda thought Julie the most powerful and beautiful girl in existence. Gilda was aware that a mysterious non-dit discouraged any discussion of Papa’s first family; her friends assured her this was par for the course, their parents almost all had been married to someone they weren’t encouraged to mention and had regrettable stepcousins or stepsiblings or whatever. She could see there was a faint family resemblance between herself and Julie, but Julie looked as if golden sunlight had been poured over a colorless Gilda prototype and warmed it till it grew and glowed and came to life.